How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. –A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

This is my granddaughter, Gracyn, on her first day of school. I’ll always remember this shy smile, the sunny yellow belt of her first-day dress, and the sweet vulnerability that made me want to snatch her away for a day of playing dollhouse, cookie-baking, and walking hand-in-hand down the lane. Today, as she begins her senior year, she faces many “lasts” as she prepares to leave the school and classmates she’s known for many years. Through all the leaving and letting go, my wish for her is this: to know how lucky she is to “have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

I’ve come to believe there’s an art to leaving, that there are those who, through grace and courage, simply do it better than others. I’m not one of these. When it comes to the art of leaving–pardon my French–I suck. In fact, I suck big-time. I began to realize this when I was eight or nine years old. A woman from my mother’s faculty wives’ group (I don’t think I ever knew her name) was moving away, her husband having taken a teaching position at another college. I didn’t really know this woman, nor do I think she was a particularly close friend of my mother’s. But I do remember that she left us an ironing board–an odd but memorable parting gift–and that I was inexplicably sad at her leaving. Decades later, I’ve struggled to explain the magnitude of such a loss. If there were a leaving report card, I’m quite confident mine would read, “needs improvement.”

And I shudder to think of my parting ritual each time I pulled away from my family home in Kearney to return to my Wisconsin or Iowa home. In West with the Night, her memoir recounting her years in Kenya in the early 1900s, Beryl Markham writes:

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

If Beryl Markham had watched me leave my Kearney home, she might’ve counseled an intervention. Leave in any way except a slow way? Nope. Leave in the fastest way you can and never turn back? No again. Each time I left, I circled the block, hoping to see my parents on the terrace still, hoping to see them wave once more, hoping that I might delay my inevitable departure. I’d like to say that I outgrew this ritual, but that would be a lie. If anything, I made more trips around the block as I aged, for the sharp teeth of mortality held me firmly in its jaws. How many more times would I see them standing on the curb, waiting until I turned the corner, and they could see me no more? I was keenly aware that any time might be the last time, that, in the immortal words of Shakespeare’s Juliet, “Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say ‘Good night” till it be morrow.”

As one who struggles to leave and to be left, I might find solace in the words of English novelist George Eliot, who wrote that “Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.” True enough. Yet, too often, because the agony cuts so deeply, we’re left busily staunching our wounds when we might begin to “look into the depths of love.” But we do look—in time and with the benefit of perspective. And when we do, the riches of this love wash over us in waves that return again and again. The only word that begins to do justice to such a feeling is bittersweet. Our partings are refined through this exquisite marriage of pain and pleasure.

Each day, as Facebook memories pop up, I discover that many are posts about Gracyn. Unbidden, tears spring to my eyes as I read them. In one post, I recalled an afternoon when my daughter and son-in-law stopped by after grocery shopping. Immediately, Gracyn asked if she could stay by herself for a while. When I said yes, she grabbed a random book off my shelf, stood in front of us, and, directing her words to her parents, pronounced, “The Big Book of Leaving says that you must leave. Now. The Big Book of Leaving says so, so get going.” Oh, The Big Book of Leaving! What immortal wisdom might such a volume impart? What stories might we find in its chapters? If there were such a book, I believe its stories and wisdom would be universal: the shared pain and pleasure of those who’ve left and been left by ones they love.

In Letters to My Daughters, professor and author Judith Minty, writes: “I give you this to take with you: Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.” Age affords us this perspective: that everything changes, that there can be joy in leaving one thing and beginning another. When I find myself yearning for the past, wishing for a “do-over,” an hour with Curious George Flies a Kite or the Dora the Explorer dollhouse, I imagine Gracyn graduating this spring and moving on to new adventures, beginning again “with pure joy in the uprooting.” I may not excel in the art of leaving and being left, but I can imagine this. And as I do, I give thanks for my beautiful granddaughter who will make saying goodbye so hard.

Why I Am Without Words

 –for Gracyn

Rooted to the kitchen floor, I stand before you

as sobs crash against your tight-lipped resolve,

your tongue useless to stay the flow

of something dark and cold that rises within

and threatens to undo you.

I’m leaving for three weeks,

and you’ve just helped me load my suitcases for the trip. 

We can’t bear to look at each other,

and shoulder to shoulder as we close the car door,

we quake, our fragile souls quiver.

It’s not for long, I say, just a couple weeks.

But the March wind seizes my words 

and whips them away like chaff.

Today, you’ve sent me a photo of the hyacinth

blooming in my garden.

Because I know you were waiting for them to bloom, you say,

because they might die before you get back.

Miles away, you think of how I’ve waited for these first blossoms

and how I might be missing you as much as you miss me.

Best friends do such things.

For eleven years, you’ve been my granddaughter,

but now—

Now, I’m without words.

I have no language to speak this mercurial joy that washes over me

each time I think of you thinking of me.

What can I say but that the blossoms here are lovely enough;

that time crawls on as it must;

and that even if all the hyacinths wither and die,

my best friend is watching the road

waiting for me to come home.